Me cago en su tumba

Another dank, dark and dismal morning in the Sunshine State, but it's comforting to know I control the press.  And who would doubt the word of Murdoch, the man America trusts and the man who controls the largest TV news outlet in America. That's right, ol' scrotum face himself channeled Hermann Goering on Twitter, barking about the "Jewish Owned" press.  

More disgusting to me is the response I see on the You Tube video, from people who are angry that anyone would be angry. Am I presumptuous to think that these same vermin would  take umbrage at my comments about the Christian owned government or the Christian owned media or the Christian backed assault on personal liberty? 

Murdoch is some 14 years older than I am, which gives me a fair chance of being able to shit on his grave.  I can't wait.

Thanksgiving turkey

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and sometimes it's just what it looks like. Sometimes, when the fat man sucks on it, all hell is smiling.

"The true story of Thanksgiving is how socialism failed."

Said Rush to a caller and President Obama is hiding that fact behind an honest account of history. No, that's not just a cigar and of course we didn't get tobacco from the Indians - what are you anyway, a Communist?

Rush Limbaugh has long since run out of relevance, run out of ways to prove that president Obama is a Kenyan, anti-colonial (would he rather have him be a pro-colonial?) Muslim Christian extremist who hates white people and is an avowed communist, atheist, trotskyite, racist antiChrist ultraLiberal Fascist. He's exhausted every epithet of every stripe -- and it seems he's now reduced to the even more pathetic state of turning the most mundane acts of traditional presidential sentiments and statements into fuel for his bonfires. Lapel pins, terrorist fist bumps; leave that to the girl scouts. Rush Limbaugh is the Big League.

What would have been, to anyone else and by anyone else, a tepid, ritual recognition of the long standing American myth that the Plymouth colony was helped in adapting to the harsh climate and unfamiliar environment of 17th century Wampanoag territory by some of the native people living there has been taught to school children for at least a century and of course it's filled with inaccuracies and covered with a sloppy whitewash, but only in the cigar sucking mind of Mr. Limbaugh does that 3rd grade pageant constitute a damnation of Mr. Obama.

In the White House thanksgiving proclamation, the president says

" A beloved American tradition, Thanksgiving Day offers us the opportunity to focus our thoughts on the grace that has been extended to our people and our country. This spirit brought together the newly arrived Pilgrims and the Wampanoag tribe -- who had been living and thriving around Plymouth, Massachusetts for thousands of years -- in an autumn harvest feast centuries ago. This Thanksgiving Day, we reflect on the compassion and contributions of Native Americans, whose skill in agriculture helped the early colonists survive, and whose rich culture continues to add to our Nation's heritage. We also pause our normal pursuits on this day and join in a spirit of fellowship and gratitude for the year's bounties and blessings."

Jesus Christ. No, really -- Jesus Christ. this could be a Sunday Sermon preached somewhere in Middle America to a pastel congregation painted by Norman Rockwell. To The Palm Beach tycoon however, it's occasion for a racist sneer about casinos and

"So, we were the invaders, we were incompetent idiots. We didn't know how to feed ourselves so they came along and showed us how and that's what Thanksgiving is all about."

Tell that to every school kid who had to make Pilgrim and Indian costumes complete with anachronistic flintlock blunderbusses and buckled shoes -- the America hating little bastards.

"He says nothing about the Constitution in his Thanksgiving Day proclamation because he's got a problem with it,"

Limbaugh continues to rant and in the absence of any supporting information for it, fails also to tell us how a document written nearly 170 years afterward would be have any relevance to the Thanksgiving holiday other than one only obvious to a malicious, neurotic saboteur grasping for any wrench he can toss into the works of truth, honesty and human decency.

But of course thanking a long ago vanished tribe, acknowledging the cultural tributaries of our nation and being grateful to whatever name one attaches to providence that our country ever came to be, is no more a qualification for venomous condemnation than saying good morning or asking what time it is. Failing to mention the Constitution of 1789 means no more than failing to mention the Emancipation Proclamation and it says nothing about Obama or the United States of America founded so many years later and mostly by other people. The only uniting element in this or any Limbaughean argument is the desperate attempt to make Obama an "America hating" alien in order to make sure we continue making the same arrogant, ignorant mistakes we pridefully ignore. If the President came out against slavery and wife beating we can be sure Rush would show us just how this was the one-way door to communism and the terrifying notion that Rush may have to earn an honest living. But Rush reveals so much with every word.

"Somebody is toying with me. Somebody is seeing if they can get one past me. Somebody is trying to take advantage of me being not as focused on the day before Thanksgiving and falling for this prank."

That's right, it's not about an alliance of convenience between the Wampanoag and a ragged group of Englishmen who had suffered serious losses in the previous winter, it's about Rush. The President isn't following tradition, isn't being aware of history, isn't telling the truth, isn't being a general good guy in that love thy neighbor and let's work together, and can't we all get along mold. He's trying to trick Rush, take advantage of Rush and interfere with Rush's millions, with the profits of his betrayal of my country, the malignant, hyperbolic, fabrications intended to sabotage everything good and decent and true.

No, it's true Rush. You're right. The long, slow and erratic movement toward freedom and responsibility and justice you're trying to retard is only something designed to get around you and your mission. There's nothing else behind it but an attempt to "get around" you and Obama's not the only one. We're all trying to trick you and in fact history is trying to trick you, the truth is trying to trick you and come to think of it, Satan himself is trying to trick you into thinking that's just a cigar.

Glenn Beck, the mean spirit of America

I think I've come to some sort of decision this morning: this isn't a country for good men and good people don't embrace men who make millions by being ugly, lying hate mongers. This is a country where the real men, corporate men thrive on the destruction of other men, institutions and ideas and amongst the things they destroy are truth, justice and what I used to call the American Way.

Take Glenn Beck's assault on George Soros, veterans and -- oh hell, he grows rich assaulting damn near everything worthwhile including history itself. Listen to how he turns Veteran's day into an Orwellian hate session using his pantheon of bogeymen:




And in all this huge nation is there no one left to stand up to this evil other than Rachel Maddow? You, with your flags and patriotism - what about you?

What's in a name?

After listening to the self-contradictory, incoherent, quasi-literate and massively hate-packed rhetoric emanating from CPAC, where we were told that the concept of progress was a Marxist idea, that Progressives wanted to progress toward Communism. Liberals were the enemy of freedom and most insane of all: "Royalists" It's hard to hold on to any hope that what's left of the American Right retains even a rudimentary grasp on reality or any commitment to any ideal in any way related to Democracy and the Rights of Man. Taxes are Communism, protection of the rights of minorities is Communism, secular democracy is communism, but collusion between corporations and government isn't, as Mussolini Defined it, Fascism -- it's freedom.

A party that won a solid majority in a free election is an "insurgency." Teddy Roosevelt, his opponent Woodrow Wilson and Adam Smith are all Communists who tried to destroy us and Glenn Beck got what he calls a "free" education, not by attending any private school, but by using taxpayer funded, government owned resources at the public library. Yes those of us who have pushed through legislation that finally allowed women and minorities to vote or own property or live like free men and women are simultaneously Nazis, Bolsheviks, Trotskyites, Maoists, and yes -- Royalists. Those of us who think vast sums of corporate money are corrupting the system are any wildly preposterous political epithet that comes to mind, but also Communists, Marxists, Trotskyites and the kinky sex partners of the Taliban. That they're not calling non-Republicans Irridentists or Scrooby Separatists is only the result of their neglected education, but of course those things are only another form of Marxist Islamofascism and Trotskyite lesbo-Feminism with a bit of royalism thrown in for flavour.

"Protect our precious Medicare?" Well that's not communism even tough it and Social Security were until the country voted for health care reform. Why? because Obama is a Fascist follower of Pol Pot, trying to corrupt our youth and a Communist, Muslim, illegal alien, soft-on-terrorism, cannibal none the less - and because any hateful insanity must be true if it vilifies Obama - he's a Royalist.

No accusation is too ludicrous whether it contradicts all the other accusations or not. It' s not important to make sense or to tell the truth; it's only important to pump up the accusations, pump up the hate.

After listening to John Yoo describe a Republican justice department according to which, an American president like the one he served has more power than any European Monarch did in the age before Democracy, including the right to wage wars, internal and foreign, suspend civil rights, amend laws, refuse to obey laws, to lie, misrepresent and fabricate and to justify any action by Presidential fiat, it's hard to believe we're not simply listening to cross talk between parallel but vastly different universes. Is it legal for the President to order that the testicles of an innocent child be crushed to make his parent talk? But of course says Professor Yoo! Do as the President says shall be the law -- but we're Royalists all the same.

It's not so much that the Republicans seem to have defined conservative values as Marxist and indeed almost everything including evil itself as its opposite, they're inventing their own paranoid psychotic reality permeated by gibbering, drooling and incoherent rage, it's that we're not in open revolt against them; that they have a huge, armed and vastly wealthy base of support.

And we just sit and listen.

Glenn Beck is Satan incarnate

So if Rush Limbaugh is the worst person in the world, what does that make Glenn Beck, whose latest excretion regarding Haiti rides on Limbaugh like a rocket on a big fat booster stage? What did he say, you ask? He said that Obama is dividing the nation by responding too quickly to the apocalypse in Haiti.

I like to think I have a foul-mouth vocabulary second to none, but I'm nearly speechless.

"I also believe this is dividing the nation…to where the nation sees him react so rapidly on Haiti and yet he couldn’t react rapidly on Afghanistan. He couldn’t react rapidly on Ft. Hood. He couldn’t react rapidly on our own airplanes with an underwear bomber…it doesn’t make sense. [...] Three different events and Haiti is the only one. I think personally that it deepens he divide to see him react this rapidly to Haiti."

Yes, the divide is clear: it's Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson on one side and everything good, compassionate or concerned in any way with humanity on the other. This is simply the voice of smug, self-satisfied evil; snickering, whining, mocking evil.

And the Foxes are talking about running him for president. The other side of the "divide" would like to run him out of the country on a rail.

This Just in:

Iowa Representative Steve King has a brilliant idea. Instead of giving Haitian illegals in the US an extra 18 months to stay here rather than recieve what is today a death sentence, King would have us deport them immediately. Presumably that would entail pushing them out of an Airplane, since there's no place to land or walking the plank since the seaport is destroyed. Need I mention that King is a Republican.

Hey God -- are you listening to this shit?

Dick the Impaler

We seem to have forgotten about torture. Comedians and far right shamans still make jokes about how those still left in the cages at Guantanamo are the "worst of the worst." People are heavily against giving them any amenities like flu shots and some have the audacity to say we treat them too well, even though so many of them have never had any case proved against them or have been cleared: so many are guilty of little more than being Muslim or accused of something by an enemy.

That Dick Cheney, the once and in his own mind future Führer pokes fun at the idea that we ever engaged in torturing prisoners and although he's not well liked by any but the most extreme subhumans, he has never suffered any consequences for having directed and promoted things we used to hang people for when I was a boy: kidnapping, torture and murder. Republicans prefer to believe him, many of the rest of us believe so much in our essential virtue that we just don't want to hear any more of it.

It's not that there is no evidence of the Bush Administration's capital crimes, not at all. We have imprisoned and tortured many people with essentially no evidence against them, but there has been a constant flow of increasingly horrible information about kidnapping and the kind of torture even Limbaugh or Dick the Impaler himself couldn't pass off as a frat-boy prank. Crain Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan now tells us, says Raw Story, that the people the CIA sent to secret dungeons there were raped with broken bottles and/or boiled alive until they "admitted" to being affiliated with Al Qaida. Some were forced to watch their children being tortured and all so that the Bush administration could justify destroying Iraq to the eager war lovers back home.

"I'm talking of people being raped with broken bottles,"

he said at a lecture in October that was re-broadcast by the Real News Network.

"I'm talking of people having their children tortured in front of them until they sign a confession. I'm talking of people being boiled alive. And the intelligence from these torture sessions was being received by the CIA, and was being passed on."

I'm not ashamed to say that I'm ashamed of my country. I'm ashamed not so much by the monsters and tyrants and murderers of children some of us still revere as heroes and patriots, but by the way we still support what they did, still can't accept the horror, don't want to be told about it, still want to continue crimes as hideous as any ever committed, because after all, these people are "suspects." These people are "the worst of the worst" whether guilty or not and most of all they aren't Christian, like us. It's not really important anyway, not like gay marriage or insurance company profits or ACORN or tax breaks for Cheney and Bush.

It's not true but it is because we know it is

No, that's not some Zen Koan, it's Rush Limbaugh. Caught being fooled by some blog with a fake Obama speech allegedly from his college years, Rush didn't apologize for his total lack of journalisticintegrity but instead called it "satire."

"You can't beat that", said Chris Matthews this evening on Hardball this evening and he's right. Rush did his usual bouncing up and down excoriating Obama for advocating massive redistribution of wealth and using as evidence a speech Obama never made. Typical Rush stuff and typical Limbaughian attempt to weasel out of it.

Humor he said, needs to have a grain of truth in it and this is humor, which of course wasn't identified as such until it became clear Rush was a victim of an amateur hoax, and that truth is provided by our inner knowledge that although Obama never ever said it he somehow has inner knowledge that Obama was thinking it - as has not been demonstrated. Get it? That's right. Rush is a mind reader and therefore can be excused for denouncing someone for something he never said or did. You can't beat that and since we know Rush is a Satan worshipping prophet of the Auntie-Christ who eats cute puppies, has sex with dead goats, is an admirer and homosexual lover of Slobodan Milošević and has a secret collection of Nazi memorabilia in his attic that he wears on Jewish holidays -- since we know it, we can sell it as the absolute truth and claim that it's journalism. That's Rush.

You can't beat it.

J'Accuse!

Fox lies and America pays the price. Sean Hannity's latest witch hunt against anything good and decent has found yet another victim in Kevin Jennings. The Obama administration employee whom Czar Hannity, mad with power, calls a "safe schools Czar," has been accused of ignoring or not reporting the sexual abuse of a minor. Of course not only is Jennings not the absolute monarch of anyplace, he's only Assistant Deputy Secretary at the Department of Education for the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools (OSDFS) and more importantly, the story isn't true.

Hannity lies and one more piece of justice dies. Of course Fox sometimes quietly retracts a story after the damage has been done -- as they have with the story insisting that Jennings one ignored a report of sexual relations between a minor student and an older man, but such lies have momentum and the mad dogs of the GOP are issuing demands that he be fired for promoting a "radical gay agenda" they would like you to believe includes the exploitation of children by gay teachers.

Fifty-three House Republicans have written President Barack Obama calling on him to fire Jennings. Jennings isn't a Czar of any kind and the gay "child" in question was above the age of consent, but Jennings is also gay and Jennings has spent a lot of time trying to make schools safer for all students, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity. Such things infuriate bigots and witch hunting religious idiots and Retro-Republican trolls and Fox is happy to fan the flames regardless of who burns as long as those ratings stay high.

The disgusting, shit-eating cockroaches calling themselves the Family Research Council (FRC) launched the “Stop Kevin Jennings” campaign this week, warning that he is a

“radical homosexual activist” who has “worked tirelessly to bring the homosexual agenda into our nation’s classrooms.”

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/16/kevin-jennings-should-res_n_323547.html

None of these people care that the story was a lie or that the accusation is a lie. Even if Fox were to give serious time recanting it ( and ten thousand other lies) it wouldn't matter. The excuse to persecute heretics, to stomp all over freedom and justice is too valuable to let go. More foetid slime to fling at Democrats is far more valuable than truth or justice.

If a lie is as good as the truth, if preventing the abuse and promoting the safety of gay students is radical activism and if truth and justice for all is to be despised as the "Gay Agenda" then maybe it is time to stand up and say "Long live the Radical Gay Agenda!" Maybe it is time for those decent citizens to say we've had enough of the hate-stinking madmen with hate-foam on their lips and the lying enemies of freedom who whip them into a religious frenzy.

Is it any wonder the Republicans oppose hate crime legislation so vehemently? The persecution of Kevin Jennings is a hate crime and the lies of Fox are hate crimes and the Republican Party is the party of hate mongering, small mindedness, injustice and persecution of liberty. It's long past time to tell those values voters their values are evil and their deeds are evil and certainly at odds with anything this country claims it stands for. We get tens of thousands of armed idiots in the streets protesting a tax increase that's actually a decrease, but why is it that we sit by and let a good man be ruined and say nothing? Why is it that we keep watching Fox and giggling and never speak up? Is it because we're no better?

In the corner

". . . whether or not these techniques are immoral, or how immoral they are, surely depends on whether they worked”

said George F. Will regarding the use of torture. How sad that anyone considers this man "conservative" or in fact listens to him at all. Although he supported a commission to study (obfuscate) the matter on ABC's This Week yesterday, Will seems to consider an extreme utilitarianism a valid moral measure. If it works to reduce crime, why not human sacrifice? Perhaps Will would like to be on the commission to "study" that.

Although the idea that a practical end justifies any means or makes crime legal or worse, is the basis of moral judgment, is frankly horrifying and although such thinking may long have been with us, it hasn't, to my knowledge been so clearly championed. The idea that such things still need to be re-examined is sickening, considering that we used opposition to this kind of Spencerian social Darwinism as a rallying cry in WW II and it's more sickening still that Will can call opposition to it "liberal" and Dick Cheney can call it "far left."

Have even the most articulate supporters of Republican policy run so far out of arguments that they have to resort to these mindless dichotomies? A cornered rat does not think of right and wrong and neither, apparently does a cornered Republican. It's just me against you and anything I do to you is justified.

Birthers, believers and bananas

There are those -- a lot of those, for whom any hint of apology for or embarrassment about the United States of its actions is treason and unforgivable. That's unforgivable and perhaps sometimes treasonous since it tends not only to reward, but promote our bad behavior.

Of course there is no way that I can apologize to the world for the "Birther" phenomenon, its psychotic proponents and demented followers, but it's surely embarrassing to contemplate the way the world sees us, which must be very much how we would see some naked savages from Papua New Guinea who happened to have nuclear weapons they were constantly threatening us with. Pardon my unforgivable frankness, but I'm embarrassed to be an American -- once again.

Of course it's worse in the South, the former Slave States where segregation, lynching and Jim Crow policies were only stopped with great effort and physical force in my youth and where even NASCAR and college football take a back seat to believing as a popular sport. Believing without evidence generates disbelieving despite the evidence and so early poll data in Virginia seems to show that almost half of Virginians believe Barak Obama was born in Kenya and that the official State data showing he wasn't, was planted over 40 years earlier in the hopes that he could one day run for president.

". . . a result making me want to bang my head against the table, the first round of calls for our Virginia poll this afternoon founds voters in the state almost evenly split on whether they thought the President was born in the US"

said PPP communications director Tom Jensen. I can well imagine.

Whether Public Policy Polling, who is conducting this poll is or is not a good prognosticator or data gatherer, responses to their announcement at their web site were centered around personal attacks and obscene comments about the snottiness of elite liberals rather than the data or the apparent insanity and delusional condition of the Birthers. Not one of them gives a damn about facts. Not one is capable of self doubt.

Of course believers rarely if ever choose what to believe without assistance and an examination of the obviously mental inventors of the libel such as Orly Taitz can make you want to put a noose around your neck -- or hers depending on your proclivities. If this woman gave you a used Rolls, would you even sit in it without a hazmat suit? None of the "birthers" would be imaginative enough to cook up this story, they got it the way Germany got Fascism: from a band of brownshirt organizers and disruptors and hooligans.

No problem for the bigots, for the believers, for the people who equate fact and reason, law and decency with fascism: Southern Whites, who for over 150 years have stood on their beliefs, on what they have been told by hatemongers to use against freedom for anyone but white males. No problem at all. If it feels good, believe it. If challenged by facts, slime the challengers, but never give up, never surrender, never stop hating.

Glenn Beck is the Anti-Christ

These are wicked, crazy, frightening people says Glenn Beck and he's right -- absolutely right. Anyone who would broadcast a story that WWW.cars.gov, the site that explains the government's cash-for-clunkers program will trick you into signing away the rights to all the information in your computer is wicked, crazy and frightening.

“They can continue to track you, basically forever, once they’ve tapped into your system … it’s so broad that they can do just about anything.” says Beck's vampiric foil Guilfoyle.

“I know who our czars are now, and this collection of these czars, these are evil people. These are wicked, crazy, frightening people.” replied Beck on his Fox News program.

The show went on to have Jonah Goldberg lie that if you log onto the site with Skype, you're giving them permission to listen to all your phone calls - something their hero Bush did with Fox's blessing.

It's a lie of course, says Kos and I'd like to think that by now someone in the Foxhouse would have bothered to notice that the privacy statement Beck showed us wasn't from Cars.gov at all but from a system registered dealers use to report the sales. you couldn't log into this system if you wanted to. I'd like to think there would be some kind of apology - in fact I'd like to see some kind of criminal prosecution, wouldn't you? I'm sure we won't. I'm sure we will see and hear more and bigger and more outrageous lies and no one will do a damned thing as we slide into ruin.

Angertainment

It's the biggest thing in America and Fox News is the dominant purveyor. Their sole purpose is to select, modify, slant and sometimes create stories to make you angry at people or things selected by their owners and sponsors.

Using animatronic devices like Britt Hume, whose synthetic skin hangs from it's metal underpinnings which in turn no longer have the ability to mimic human facial expressions, Fox sells anger and unlike our automobile industry they can come out with a finished new product in minutes.

The current angertainment opera has to do with President Obama's seemingly hasty and harsh comments about the Cambridge Massachusetts police force. That occurrence has been welded together with another twisted work of fiction in which he has been touring the world "apologizing for America" to come up with the logically contradictory premise that he is "arrogant" and too arrogant to apologize even though he apologizes too much.

The subtext is that the country never has done anything it shouldn't have and we are always perfect because of our military strength and number of privately owned Hummers and that of course is a position broadcasting megawatts of arrogance like some annoying beacon.

Of course that Obama actually has apologized and in addition arranged to mediate between the two contestants goes unnoticed by the corpse-faced Hume and to the Fox Flock who only listen to the Fox product, that never happened and so presto chango, the wimp Obama becomes the arrogant Obama all at the same time. It's all angertainment.

Who cares that self contradictory arguments based on little but manufactured tribal anger are by nature false and in effect are crippling and disuniting our country? It's angertainment and it makes money and it takes power and it feels so good to be part of an angry tribe with an enemy to be attacked!

“The president could have said ‘that was a stupid thing for me to say,’ but he can’t say that for some reason"

said Hume yesterday. It could also be that Obama's actions speak louder than Obama's words and it could also be tragically humorous since he follows the most arrogant president in our history who admitted no fault while dragging us all to ruin and lawlessness. Of course Hume and whoever runs his software never wanted you to be angry at Bush who apologized for nothing. They wanted you to be angry at his critics and they remain far too arrogant to sum up their entire malignant war on truth by saying "that was a stupid thing for me to say."

No lie too big, no mind too small, no lie too disgusting

Get ready for it: another surge in the Anti-Obama Wars will be arriving in about a week with a new and more specious attack from the Derangement Rangers, or as these vampires call themselves the Our Country Deserves Better PAC. Twisting facts and flinging fallacy, they intend to pump up the rage junkies for some purpose we can only imagine and we can be sure that if someone stupid enough to buy their product acts on that rage, they will wash their hands of it and blame the liberals. In fact they're already doing it.

I can say that because the ad will apparently reference the recent intelligence report warning of increased right wing terrorist activity -- which of course proved true: blood, bullets, bodies and all -- as an example amongst many, of how Barak Obama is just like Adolph Hitler.

"As the regime spun out of control, they labeled political opponents domestic terrorists, and warned of confrontations between such groups and government authorities."

Is their view of an all too correct observation. Too damned bad more attention wasn't payed over the howls of offended wingnuts and too damned amazing that they're still howling after the warning was proved accurate.

Of course it takes a special person to see this alleged spin-out of the administration, but the accusation is quite predictable. Indeed every accusation made against Bush, no matter how true, is going to be re-labelled and returned in the same fashion as Watergate was reprised in every word and action and relaunched against Bill Clinton.

"They proposed a civilian security force, and a Congressman warned it was exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany. Opposition heightened after voter fraud by the president's allies, including thousands of bogus voter registration [sic]"

Since I'm personally involved with civilian security (Amateur Radio Emergency Services) I would have to laugh at a bunch of retired engineers volunteering to do emergency communications in a disaster being compared to Storm Troopers, but it's hard to understand why a thousand or two bad registrations, which don't seem to have produced any actual votes could account for the 9 million vote Obama victory. Hard, unless you're up to no good yourself and of course the OCDB PAC isn't. It's the illegitimate child of Howard Kaloogian, the fellow who during his losing campaign to replace disgraced Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham told us that Iraq was safe and almost free of violence and that the fact was being hidden by -- you guessed it -- the Liberal Press who of course support terrorism. Is there any doubt?

"And now the Obama Administration is warning law enforcement to focus their attention on the dangers of conservatives."

says their website. They're not, unless you describe murderers as Conservatives, but I am and I can't help but mention that this kind of rhetoric and this kind of campaign was pioneered by Adolph Hitler himself.

These people are deranged, malignant well financed and well armed. Oh yes and dishonest, did I mention dishonest?

What are we going to do about Newt?

Just for the record, and in case you've forgotten, the forced resignations of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew had nothing to do with burglary, arson, bribery and extortion: it was all political, unlike the $50,000,000 investigation of Bill Clinton's sex life and a real estate deal in which he lost money. That was about law and principle, like ignoring Newt Gingrich's serial affairs and tax frauds while he accuses others was -- a matter of principle.

Welcome to Republican Bizarro World where everything is its opposite. Newt reminds us that calls by some Democrats for investigations into Bush administration torture and secret imprisonment without trial practices amounts to a partisan attack reminiscent of the McCarthy era.

"The degree that they’re putting specific people at risk for prosecution is unprecedented in modern America,”

he said to Chris Wallace, without any foundation in fact of any kind. Of course he hopes you won't remember how unprecedented it was to prosecute a president for a private consensual affair or for testifying falsely about something that wasn't a crime or related to one.

“They haven’t passed a law making water boarding illegal. They haven’t gone into any of these things and changed law,”

although since the US has already prosecuted people for water boarding as a war crime it would seem to indicate they didn't need to make it redundantly illegal. We also have to ask why, if it was legal, and publicizing it terrorizes the terrorists, Bush denied having done it.

No, Virginia, Theater of the Absurd didn't go out of fashion in the 1960's, it simply became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party. What else would you call it but absurd if Bush didn't do anything illegal, because it's not illegal if he does it? What else would you call an argument stating that murder wasn't illegal because since the murderer got caught, nobody bothered to make what already was illegal, illegal again? And after all nobody, says Newt, ever put anybody at risk for prosecution like the Democrats are doing, just because they committed a crime -- or didn't which is the same thing you see, depending on whether it was done by a Republican or not.

And then, of course there's the danger of seeming to be "soft on terrorism" which of course nobody actually is unless we make it legal to torture through legislation or through precedent (and according to Ann, far more vicious.) By Newts logic, the US was soft on the Nazis and the Empire of Japan because we didn't torture them. It must have been coincidence that we weren't conquered.

Really, is it that they hope to wear us down or perhaps to erode logic so much that opposites will become the same and judgment will be simply a matter of doing what we can get away with? We have voted them out of office, but they still have the ability to scream endlessly in our ears.
History proves that there are always enough supporters to make any demagogue dangerous if we let it go on too long, so what do we do about them?

Charles Krauthammer is…

…you guessed it…an idiot!

I know there has been a lot of discussion of this here lately, but it's so important I wanted to add this. In his Friday column, Charles Krauthammer outlined scenarios under which torture is appropriate.

Torture is an impermissible evil. Except under two circumstances. The first is the ticking time bomb.

[...]

The second exception to the no-torture rule is the extraction of information from a high-value enemy in possession of high-value information likely to save lives. This case lacks the black-and-white clarity of the ticking time bomb scenario. We know less about the length of the fuse or the nature of the next attack. But we do know the danger is great.

[...]

Under those circumstances, you do what you have to do. And that includes waterboarding. (To call some of the other “enhanced interrogation” techniques — face slap, sleep interruption, a caterpillar in a small space — torture is to empty the word of any meaning.)

Of course the ticking time bomb scenario never really occurs. We’ve been Jack Bauered into believing torture is occasionally the only means of gathering information needed to save lives. But in reality, effective interrogators can make even the most despicable terrorists sing without raising a fist. Krauthammer raises concerns that this less barbaric approach, while it can be effective, takes too long. But we are never really in a position in which we know of an impending threat and know exactly which captive has the exact information on that threat that we’re missing. We either have enough information to act without resorting to torture or we’re even more in the dark, in which case, unless we relentlessly torture everyone we come across, we can’t possibly get the right information in time anyway. This article from The Progressive a few years ago explains very well why all of Krauthammer’s logic is wrong (it’s a bit long, but a must read).

(And isn’t interesting that Krauthammer reduces prolonged sleep deprivation where captives are kept in a brightly lit room and doused with water any time they start to nod off to “sleep interruption.” It takes a special kind of depravity to turn something that is clearly cruel and inhumane into a mere “interruption.”)

Krauthammer goes on to cite intelligence officials - Tenet, Hayden, and Blair (at most one of which is reliable - Blair) - who said we gathered valuable information from these enhanced interrogation sessions. This of course ignores the fact that 1) we could have gotten the information through less horrendous means (which Krauthammer simply dismisses by saying that KSM wouldn’t have cooperated - but last I checked, Charles Krauthammer wasn’t a trained professional interrogator) and 2) information gathered through torture is unreliable. I ask all defenders of torture to try to put themselves in the shoes of these captives. Your strapped down. You have a towel placed over your face and a jug of water poured over the towel so you literally can’t breath. You feel as though you are drowning. Then you are subjected to that treatment 182 more times. At that point (most likely much sooner) would you not tell your interrogators anything they wanted to hear - true or not? I would. And that’s just the point. False confessions are too likely. And if just one confession is false, that brings into question the reliability of all other information gleaned through torture.

But there is a larger problem with the recent debate over torture - that there even is a debate. Torture is morally wrong, it’s ineffective, it creates an abysmal image of our nation abroad (and at home), and it even puts us on a slippery slope to worse practices (the above linked Progressive article effectively explains how torture policies can lead to extensive extrajudicial executions - the CIA notes that it’s Phoenix program during the Vietnam War resulted in more than 20,000 such executions). In short, torture is un-American. As Glenn Greenwald pointed out, even Ronald Reagan, not exactly a bastion of liberal thought, made a strong push against torture - he even helped ratify a treaty against it. Yet many of today’s conservatives argue that torture is justified. I’ll say this plainly: torture is never justified. How low have we sunk?

--

Adapted from a post at The Political Panorama.

Let's all torture like it's 1499

I know, I know, you're going to tell me that I'm obsessed with Ann Coulter and I should just ignore her until she goes away. Well, I'm not and she won't of course, but it's just that every time I think I've identified the craziest or most repugnant, evil minded, nasty and dishonest humanoid resident within the US borders, Ann, like one of those sea cucumbers that extrudes its intestines in order to gross out predators, gives us another and bigger load from her oversized colon.

Yes, of course Rush Gassbaugh is already on record as stating that the beatings, the attachment of electrodes to testicles and worse at Abu Ghraib were something only a girly man and liberal would object to, but Abu Ghraib is old news. It's all about Guantanamo and it's Ann's turn to tell us that waterboarding someone 189 times is just like a carnival ride people would actually pay to experience and that "the Muslims" are laughing at our weakness because we don't torture them enough. Only a hundred have died, after all. What we do is to put an "adorable little caterpillar" in someones cell, said adorable Ann to Sean "insanity" Hannity -- kind of like Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition using soft pillows and comfy chairs. We're "Wussies" for having any sense of morality greater than a jackal's says Ann while lounging around her luxury Palm Beach estate drinking a glass of human blood and munching on some child's barbecued leg.

Of course she's referring to our playing on some prisoner's phobias and to some, being trapped and unable to prevent an insect crawling up their leg is worse than pain. We all have some secret fear, after all. Imagine being trapped in an elevator with Coulter and Limbaugh, for instance, on the day you forgot to take your gun with you.

So I guess what the Arm Chair warriors from Palm Beach would like to see, is an America so utterly depraved and devoid of conscience as to make the world shudder in horror as we torture, maim and kill for pleasure -- you know, like real men like Ann and Rush do. Well they don't actually do anything, but they do giggle and laugh and snicker and mock decency while telling us we're "godless" for not torturing more people in more horrific ways and that we're suffering from "derangement syndromes" for criticizing evil.

Anyway, the dishonesty, the depravity, the malignant personality of laughing Ann doesn't need me to criticize it. Someone who makes a living lying, insisting that concerns of right and wrong, good and evil are for weaklings and that only cruel and inhuman leaders who make us safe by terrifying and disgusting the world can be supported -- while ridiculing liberals for being without religion isn't going to listen, and those who support her will simply read inexplicable hostility into my words and claim she's the victim.

We don't burn these people at the stake any more -- perhaps that's the danger of being Godless, but I'm just as happy that he's dead or gone or never was at all, since this is the kind of thing that would provoke any deity into raising the sea level once again.

Twinkle, twinkle, evil Starr,

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Ken Starr, the man who thought you should go to jail for using the word "breast" on the internet even in conjunction with words like cancer and mammography, yet led the taxpayer funded multi-million dollar investigation into the President's sex life and published it on the internet in lurid and pornographic detail, is still alive. Yes, it's amazing, but some reptiles do live a long time.

Starr, the sex-obsessed fighter against dirty pictures and swear words, hasn't changed much, he's just picking on another obsession of his - homosexuals. Ken somehow obtained a law degree and was admitted into the bar somewhere, but really he's a preacher of a puritanical bent and of the sort our founding fathers loathed so much that they eloquently and passionately expressed that loathing in word and deed. One of those deeds and words was the the declaration of independence; that manifesto of the natural and inalienable nature of human rights.

Ken Starr will have none of it. We have no rights but what the government allows and what the government allows, the government can disallow. That may have been a bit much even for George III, but in any event it's at odds with the entire philosophy from which the United States grew and a worldwide quest for freedom from religious and secular tyranny emerged.

Kenn Starr will have none of it. Ken, whose resemblance to a circumcised penis is striking, has the ill nature to go along with his appearance and so is arguing to uphold California's outrageous proposition 8. A majority he says, can simply remove the rights of a minority and so there's no real reason we couldn't restore slavery, expulsion of Chinese citizens and remove the voting rights of women and non white males.

Did I mention that Ken is a Republican? When we put the puzzle piece that is Ken Starr together with other pieces from the Bush Justice Department, we start to see a picture of America that resembles the great tyrannies of the past and present; and America that has been tricked into going not only back to the nations under God we broke from, where the ruler's right came from God and yours, if you had any, were at the grace and whim of that ruler.

How close we are to the precipice -- it's no wonder that we hear such bellowing and howling from the greedy devils. We have come so close, they have made a tower of slime almost tall enough to reach our liberty. They can almost taste our soul.

Out of touch, off base and irrelevant

Well of course I'm a demented, deranged, hair-on-fire, crazy Liberal Kike, personally responsible for the economic debacle -- at least that's what some Rush Limbaugh supporters tell me and who am I to argue? I'm obviously "out of touch, off base, and irrelevant" in my displeasure with the Republicans -- just like a two thirds majority of America.

The Democrat, liberal, immigrant loving, freedom hating big spenders are taking the country straight to hell now that my fringe element minority of 65% has removed the thrifty, honest and morally upright Republican majority from control -- that is if the "terrorists" don't take over DesMoines and kill us all with flouride first.

Yes, that's right, Republicans stand for limited government, but not just yet, and markets so free they're lawless. They're all for the unlimited freedom to obey, for massive military spending without oversight, for massive transfers of wealth to offshore corporations -- without oversight; and so much do they believe in it, they are happy to listen to your phone calls, read your mail, intercept your e-mails and faxes and peek in your windows to make sure you're happy about it.

What are we going to do, now that they're gone? And how sad it is just when they were about to turn the Democrat sabotaged economy around with even more borrowing, spending and tax cuts for billionaires.

So anyway, when you read John Yoo's memo to Bush in Newsweek asserting that "First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully," you can be sure it's only the Jew-bastard Liberals lying through their long noses. Even so, unlimited power for the President is only another way of looking at limited government. Ask Rush to explain it to you.

Foxed up

President Obama has made so many egregious mistakes that we're all in terrible danger. He's sending the "worst of the worst" from Guantanamo to your children's playgrounds. His appointments can't be trusted and most "shocking" of all, even though Mike Wallace all but forced Chief Justice Roberts to swear him in the second time, Obama isn't really the president because he didn't have his hand on "the Bible." No, I haven't gone completely insane, I'm quoting Fox News. If you watched The Daily Show Thursday night, you saw the following clip:




You see, I'm not making this stuff up. The same people who told you we have to, in the name of freedom and our safety obey the Führer president and the same people who supported each and every act that brought on our dire predicaments; who insisted that economic collapse was a liberal lie, that we were about to "win" in Iraq every day since we arrived, are telling you this one really can't be obeyed. Of course those with longer memories remember when Bill Clinton wasn't, for some Foxed up reason I no longer remember, really the president either and shouldn't be listened to.

So whether or not Fox lives up to its promise of revealing some hideous hidden "truth" behind every aspect of the Obama presidency once a day for the first hundred days, I won't be watching them. Unfortunately others will and for them the fiction will seem real and the fear will grow. I find it hard to feel any kind of optimism and those who think that we've "won" and that things are in good hands now may soon find that the process of losing started on November 20th.

The people who watch Fox usually don't watch anything else. They have no idea that the lies and distortions they've been hearing are often repudiated and disproved by all the other news services. They haven't a clue that one of the largest anti-American campaigns, indeed the most organized program of treason against truth, justice and democracy is broadcasting 24 hours a day. Fox is using and will use everything they can find to undermine confidence in our government and anything it does and as you can see is hoping our country will fall and our hopes will fail. To me, it constitutes as great a danger to our future as any foreign enemy or global economic collapse. Traitors, saboteurs, liars and purveyors of irrational hate, Fox News is the enemy and anyone who hopes not just for our survival, but our improvement owes it to the world to use every opportunity to expose them.

I hope he fails

I've called him all kinds of names, from Limpboy to liar to Rush the magic blowhard. This time Rush Limbaugh has left me at a loss for a proper pejorative. I guess that puts me in the drivers' seat as a "driveby journalist" but when I listen to him this time, listen to him saying he hopes Barak Obama fails as president, hopes the "liberalism" he represents fails and pretends it's all about the kinds of people Obama appoints, the decisions he makes, I can only descend into obscenity.

He blames Obama, he says, for a policy that includes massive bailouts and the nationalization of the private sector. I shouldn't have to point out the distortion or the irony. The "Liberals" he says, were out to get Bush even before Bush ruined the world so it's fair, even though Bush and his fake war were supported massively by such straw men as the New York Times, even though the economic policies Rush supports have failed consistently for 30 years.

Hoping Obama succeeds is "affirmative action," it's "supporting incompetence," it's advocating "socialism." He's the "last man standing" says he, but it's all about a better America for his nieces and nephews. I wish he were the last man standing -- against the wall, because if Obama fails to undo what people like Rush and the pirates and buccaneers he supports have done, the country will only be worth living in for the heirs of plutocratic bloviators and the world will be in ruins. If Obama fails, we all fail.

Was anyone ever so thoroughly dishonest, completely reprehensible? Perhaps yes. Did anyone ever make so much money at it, maybe not. Behold the man who hopes you lose your job and your home because it offends hisReaganoid ideology. Here's the man who avoided the draft because his anus was sore, here's the man who tries to pin a drug charge on his housekeeper. Here's his 51,000 square foot home on the Atlantic ocean in Palm beach where he sits in the sun and complains about being a victim. You bought it for him, because you hate America, because you hate justice, because you're a coward, because you think bigotry is cute, because you're afraid someone will pull the rug out from under your miserable life if you don't side with the people who kidnapped America and held it for ransom.

Our country faces a world economic crisis as dangerous as anything we have faced. You and I are more likely to lose everything we have than at any time in the last 80 years; Rush isn't. In fact the worse it gets, and as he says, he hopes it will, the more material he has and the more support he will get from those who insist we need more of what Reagan and the two Bush's gave us.

If Obama succeeds, if we succeed in turning around the economy, stopping the biggest incursions on personal liberty in our history and in extricating ourselves from the war Bush started for his own reasons, Limbaugh will become as embarrassing and repugnant as the equally popular Father Coughlin did in the 1930's when it became obvious that his policies were indistinguishable from Hitler's. It can happen. We can be rid of him. Yes we can.